The average American home has enough unused electrical capacity to run a small data center. Until now, no one has found a way to use it. What if the answer to AI’s power problem was the panel installed next to the side of your house?
SPAN turns that idle capacity into a distributed data center, one house at a time.
On a recent Inevitable episode, Cody sat down with Arch Rao, Founder of SPAN, who breaks down the company’s XFRA product, why it exists, and how it turns homes into infrastructure:
Homes have far more capacity than they use. Across the 200-amp homes SPAN has installed in, north of 98% have roughly 19 kilowatts of conductor capacity sitting completely unused.
XFRA turns that idle capacity into a distributed data center. Instead of one large facility, XFRA is a fleet of small nodes, each hosted at a home with spare capacity, coordinated together as a single cloud for AI inference.
Homeowners can get benefits for hosting. Rather than letting that capacity sit still, SPAN lets homeowners lease it out in exchange for discounted electricity, high-speed internet, and home backup power.
The Hardware
Each XFRA Node pairs a compute module with a SPAN Panel, giving it a real-time view into each home’s energy and hardware capacity. Inside that module, XFRA Nodes pack 16 GPUs, 4 CPUs, and 3 terabytes of memory, cooled by their own heat pump and backed by a 15 kilowatt-hour battery. By tapping into the home’s unused capacity across a distributed fleet, XFRA delivers gigawatts of new inference capacity faster and cheaper than a conventional data center.
That same fleet-level view opens up a different kind of control. If one region is carrying too much load, XFRA can simply shift inference workloads to wherever there’s headroom.
Arch sees that shift as the real energy transition: not gas to electric, but analog to digital. As the grid becomes more digital, it needs better visibility, better controls, and better fleet-level optimization to make full use of our existing distribution network.
By treating unused capacity as shared infrastructure, SPAN is making sure that not a single watt or home gets left behind in the energy transition.
Note: SPAN is an MCJ portfolio company.
Listen to the conversation wherever you get your podcast.
🎙️ Inevitable Podcast
Fiona Spruill is CEO of Overstory, a company helping electric utilities reduce power outages and wildfire risk using satellite imagery, aerial data, and AI-powered vegetation intelligence. The conversation explores how Overstory combines satellite imagery, computer vision, and customer data to help utilities identify vegetation threats, wildfire fuels, and infrastructure risks before disasters occur. Listen to the episode here.
🚀 MCJ Portfolio Highlights: August 2026
From home batteries to nuclear fuel deals, here’s what MCJ Portfolio companies accomplished recently:
Base Power raised a $1B Series D led by Ribbit Capital, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group and launched Base Core, one of the largest home batteries, built and produced in Austin.
Odyssey Energy Solutions raised $74M to accelerate distributed renewable energy financing.
Light raised $46M led by Matrix to scale the power company for embedded electricity.
Revoy raised $27M led by Standard Capital to scale its detachable electric dolly that adds an electric drivetrain to diesel trucks without replacing the fleet.
Reservoir raised an $8M seed led by Asymmetric, with Founder Collective and MCJ, for a smart water heater that saves Boston homeowners up to $1,000 a year in energy costs.
Crusoe and Aalo Atomics are partnering to build a nuclear-powered AI factory data center, combining Crusoe’s energy-first AI infrastructure with Aalo’s modular nuclear technology.
Phoenix Tailings landed a $500M Pentagon commitment to scale samarium metal output 600x by 2028, extracting minerals from mine waste.
Pacific Fusion broke ground on a New Mexico facility designed to hit net facility gain.
Epoch Biodesign acquired a 52,000-ton polymer facility in Spain, adding commercial-scale polymer production to its biorecycling platform.
Quilt launched Quilt Tools, a remote diagnostics platform for residential HVAC, giving partners 10x the sensors and 500x more computing power.
WeaveGrid and Tucson Electric Power launched Smart Charge, rewarding EV drivers with bill credits for charging at grid-friendly times.
Standard Nuclear signed fuel deals with Antares and Radiant, supplying Antares with up to 8 MTU of TRISO fuel through 2035 and powering Radiant’s 1 MW Kaleidos microreactor.
👩💻 Climate Jobs
MCJ portfolio companies that are hiring this week:
Office Administrator at SPAN (San Francisco, CA)
Executive Assistant at Mill (San Bruno, CA)
Construction Project Specialist at Crusoe (Remote - US)
Software Engineer, Distributed Systems at Verse (San Francisco, CA)
Senior Vice President, Deployment at The Nuclear Company (Washington, DC, Columbia, SC, or Lexington, KY)
Procurement Contract Administrator at The Nuclear Company (Columbia, SC)
Staff Industrial Site Development Engineer at Charm (Fort Lupton, CO)
EMEA Sales Manager - Nylon Polyamide at Epoch Biodesign (London, UK or Remote)
Customer Retention at Light (Remote)
Join our talent network to view details and apply. Once your profile is set up, we’ll match you with relevant opportunities across our portfolio.